Be Extraordinary! Mobile Micro-volunteering

Posted on | August 9, 2009 | No Comments

‘Micro-volunteering’ is a new mobile arena being pioneered by The Extraordinaries, among others. In this podcast, I speak with Jacob Colker, CEO and co-founder of the start-up company, about how volunteers can donate small amounts of time to help non-profits with tasks like tagging images, checking addresses, or translating text through their web-enabled phones. Along the way Jacob comes up with some great ideas of how museums can use mobile apps to reinforce its role as a platform, connecting visitors in the galleries to people around the world. Noting that mobile is about ‘real-time’ interaction, he also discusses the future of ‘traditional’ cellphone uses, like voice calls and SMS, predicting the obsolescence of the latter – in the US anyway – within the next 5 years. We give a shout-out for the Steve.Museum social tagging project, and each get in a little call for museums to ‘let go’ and put at least as much energy into figuring out how to make innovations work as we currently invest in nay-saying.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (15.4MB)

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